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Table of conTenTs
2 execuTive summary3 inTroducTion3 clouds Today and Tomorrow5 The cloud Taxonomy7 whaT cloud compuTing isn’T7 why cloud compuTing8 who creaTes clouds and who uses Them9 one size does noT fiT all9 adopTion consideraTions11 moving To The cloud
Red Hat Cloud Foundations:
cloud 101
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exeCutive summaRy
Clouds are a new way of building IT infrastructures from dynamic pools of virtualized resources that
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are operated as low-touch IT services and are consumed in a modern, web-savvy way.Conceptually, cloud computing can be thought of as building resource abstraction and control on top
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of the hardware abstraction provided by virtualization.In most cases, cloud computing infrastructures will evolve in scope and complexity over time. Functions
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such as elastic provisioning, metering, and self-service will often be added as the environment maturesand goes into full production.Cloud computing includes delivering services from multiple levels of the software stack. The most widely-
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used taxonomy species Infrastructure-as-a-Service (e.g. compute and storage), Platform-as-a-Service(e.g. middleware and infrastructure automation), and Software-as-a-Service (applications). These levels
may layer on top of each other but can also exist independently.
Cloud computing can take place either on-premises (private cloud), as a shared, multi-tenant,
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off-premises resource (public cloud), or some combination of the two (hybrid cloud).
Cloud computing is not just another name for virtualization. It builds on virtualization, and constructing
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a virtualized infrastructure will be the rst step to a private cloud for many customers.A private cloud improves efciency, helps organizations save money, and improves service levels relative
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to less exible and dynamic IT infrastructures.Public clouds offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model for computing resources that customers do not need
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to own or operate themselves.Clouds take many forms because different customers or even different business units and applications
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within a single customer have vastly different requirements. One size doesn’t t all.
Cloud infrastructure should support interoperability, open standards, and the ability to run existing
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applications in many different environments and on many different clouds.
Clouds should provide exibility for your organization and not lock you into a single vendor’s solution.
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Red Hat Cloud Foundations: Cloud 101
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intRoduCtion
In a remarkably short time, cloud computing has emerged as a hugely important evolution in the way thatbusinesses and individuals consume and operate computing. It’s a fundamental shift to an operational
model in which applications don’t live out their lives on a specic piece of hardware and in which resourcesare more exibly deployed than was the historical norm. It’s also a fundamental shift to a development and
consumption model that replaces hard-wired, proprietary connections among software components and theconsumers of those components with lightweight web services and web-based software access.In short, cloud computing refers to a convergence of technologies and trends that are making IT infrastruc-tures and applications more dynamic, more modular, and more consumable. That’s a big change that hasimplications that touch on just about every aspect of computing.For end-user customers, cloud computing provides the means to ramp up new services or reallocatecomputing resources rapidly, based on business needs. It means having the ability to run an application
either on-premises or off-premises (or a combination of the two) based on cost, capacity requirements,
and other factors. For software vendors, cloud computing offers new ways to deliver applications andreduce the friction associated with installing upgrades or additional modules.However, for something that is in many ways at the fore of where information technology is headed, itcan still be a challenge to get your arms around what cloud computing is exactly. The biggest stumblingblock is that while cloud computing as a high-level business concept and technology approach can bedescribed succinctly, it takes a variety of different forms that aren’t always obviously related to each other.Furthermore, the pains that cloud computing relieves aren’t necessarily the same for datacenter opera-tors, developers, and end-users; thus, what’s most relevant about cloud computing to you depends to some
degree on who you are and where you are located in an organization. Plus, of course, cloud computing is
young, and it continues to develop along many axes.This whitepaper aims to make sense of it all for audiences that haven’t been deeply involved in the details ofcloud computing as it has rapidly evolved. It lays out the characteristics of a cloud computing infrastructure.
It discusses some of the things that cloud computing isn’t, even if they’re often conated in customers’ and
prospects’ minds. It describes the forms that cloud computing can take and how different types of tech-nology providers and consumers of technology relate to each other.
Clouds today and tomoRRow
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) denes cloud computing as “a model for enablingconvenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of congurable computing resources (e.g., networks,servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimalmanagement effort or service provider interaction.” This denition, together with associated service and
deployment models, has emerged as a tough industry consensus of where cloud computing is headed.
(http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/)
Red Hat Cloud Foundations: Cloud 101
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